Sonic Portal

Yeah I wonder if any of the videos I share are doing much justice to how well this mechanic could work. I'm not sure if this whole concept is that interesting to a lot of people (I mean the immersion in the Portal games is totally taken away in this project by being 2D) but damn it's fun to develop and I am learning a lot of stuff

Here's a video I uploaded a while back showing the mechanics of another gel, an unused gel in the official portal that would allow you to stick to walls (Sort of like the spike form in Sonic Colours). Now see, this seems fun and interesting, but I don't know if it's stepping into the "disorientating gameplay" territory.

Ah thanks guys, I really appreciate the comments. It's hard to keep motivation developing this as I keep hitting collision issues and optimisation issues, and I only have a handful of hours per week that get spent mainly on those issues. Once I solve one, I find another. Gets real tiresome. I just want to get something somewhat presentable out there for you guys to mess around with.

Yeah I love multiplayer stuff. I used to be obsessed with playing SRB2 online multiplayer, was good fun and was the one and only time I ever got to play some form of "Online Sonic" game.

I have designed the game to allow multiple characters that can be assigned to different input devices (Keyboard and Gamepad), so local multiplayer exists. Each character can have its own set of portals too, the engine allows an unlimited amount of different pairs of portals. Also I've made a very unfinished but still sort of functional online multiplayer. This sort of stuff would be fun to share but I don't really have anyone to help me out in creating multiplayer videos and whatnot. I could try and play as two players at the same time on my own but it'd look stupid on video lol.

I want to upload more stuff about this project in general. I spend a lot of time reaching big goals in a technical aspect, but it is not as visible to everyone unless they have had the same exposure to the game than I have, so I shy away from sharing anything about it. The game is far from finished but I want people to be part of the development journey with me if they are interested, but I'm not sure how to find people. I started up a blog but felt that was a silly idea because I have no idea how people would happen to come across that and also it doesn't feel as convenient for people to view.

Just in case anyone is interested at all, I still work on this game!
I work on it when I have free time and not feeling mentally exhausted, which is pretty frequent as of now. I put up a video to briefly show local multiplayer a few months ago (still extremely early alpha, just getting the programming in mainly).
Also I only realised now that I did something really weird with the video's rendering settings, so things look weird and jittery. I should spend time figuring out the perfect video settings at some point, but I rather focus more strictly on developing the game as I really want to get something out there for people to play and solve puzzles themselves rather than have me ruin the fun. Nothing less exciting than a developer showing videos of their puzzle game and completing the puzzles before you even get the opportunity to attempt them.
I have a lot of surprises in store...

Thanks cmakeshift!
I have some very ambitious ideas I want to do. I won't go into detail too much because, as much as I'd appreciate the attention it could potentially bring to this project, I don't want to list a bunch of plans and features until I'm certain they are doable. I'll mention things I know will definitely happen or are already in progress.

With that said, I have this as the main goal of what to do with this engine:

A story mode in the style of how the Portal games do their story-telling (Story cutscene, do a puzzle or two, more story, etc., with the cutscenes not being too long-winded). In terms of skill level/difficulty, this will also be similar to how Portal do this: Start off easy and gets progressively complicated later on, but nothing too torturous... maybe...
I have many ideas for certain parts of this mode and am currently experimenting and it feels interesting so far. Although it's only my opinion and perspective for now which could be skewed as I'm constantly developing and looking at this project all the time and don't get to see it purely for what it is.
There's also the question before I get too far into development; there will be the characters from Sonic 3 as playable characters (Sonic, Tails, Knuckles) as they each have interesting elements to add to portal-style puzzles. So- what is best to structure when to play as certain characters? Either pick the character and play (like Sonic 3 or Sonic Adventure 1), or have the characters selected when necessary to the plot (Sonic Adventure 2).

Co-op mode (unsure whether or not to follow Portal's route and make this story-driven or not as of now). This will be both local co-op and online multiplayer.

Map editor, that generates files to save and load. Also mod support and editors, so anyone can easily load and replace sprites easily and accurately.

A time trial mode. This will allow you to play story mode's puzzles quick and easily, as well as play other pre-made puzzles and can load maps made by the Map editor.

So that's a brief description of some of the structure this project will have. I don't see any reason why these will change as it sounds doable and fun to mess around with and I have developed each of these parts at least a tiny bit... except for time trial mode, but that would be easy as pie to program.......*2 years later* DAMNITHOW DO I PROGRAM TIME TRIAL.

It's weird I worked on this almost 3 years ago. This thread, in a personal way, is a nice little reminder of how much passion I had and how I've become another statistic of the burnt-out fangame developer.

I stopped working on this project due to influences around me and my own thoughts, leading me to believe it's a waste of time to focus on fangames. Now, that's not to say I hate fangames or anything, I have lurked Sonic Retro for years, keeping up with a lot of with regards to hacking and fangames, but I thought maybe to give game design a try in another direction, without relying on Sonic, even though I was so passionate about developing Sonic Portal.

I began working on a new original game with a partner I met online, but that caused a major shift in my mental wellbeing as I learnt about working in a team; I didn't want to fail a partner but also couldn't keep up with the schedule we had agreed on (which was killer; working a full-time job and then coming home to continuously program until 11pm, including the entirety of Sundays), and I was too non-confrontational to discuss and change it. So around December 2016, with many disagreements and negativity with the partner and burn out, I quit the project, I stopped using Construct 2 as much, got put off of Construct 2 since, well, Construct 3 was getting released, with terrible support for plugins I needed in Construct 2, and I was just burnt the hell out from the previous project.
Very demotivating; Construct 2, will just remain with it's quirks and CPU-based performance issues unless I decide to pay a yearly subscription to Construct 3 and start over.
A month or two later, I randomly decided to just give Construct 2 one more go as I know it so well, and started a newer engine based on, yep, Sonic again. Looking at my previous flaws in Sonic Portal, I wanted to make a tighter collision system that performed better from new ideas I thought of, and a workaround for customisation of sprites as C2 lacked fine-tuned external image loading. Didn't hardly get anywhere and I just stopped programming entirely.

Anyway, rereading this short-lived thread, seeing the excitement of my posts and seeing people comment and even have discussions on an idea I have brought to the table was an amazing feeling, I'm still thankful people here took the time to peek at the videos and write out a comment. So thanks for that, you guys are way past cool.

I checked out the project file on my computer to see what state Sonic Portal was last in, and oh boy, I'm looking at all these broken test maps, trying to figure out the old "console commands" I had made for testing, it was a nightmare. I for some reason broke left/right wall collision the last time I worked on it, and many effects are glitched. I can see I was working on some lighting for a S3K Carnival Night zone theme. I also see online multiplayer code I made, don't know if that works lol. It's tricky to immediately fix a lot of this because the entire Sonic movement and collision engine was done using purely events, to give me ease of access to move collision detection across the map so you can collide with walls and objects that you can't see onscreen but are on the other side of the portal.
I checked this out hoping it was easy to just brush it up a bit and release some sort of alpha version to let people experiment and experience and mess with the engine, and play in some sandbox maps, very few actual puzzles, and some debugging options to spawn stuff and play around. Looks like it's a fair bit of work to re-learn what I made and fix important things. I may try, but the burnout is still in me, nor do I understand why it's so broken since I last worked on it.

I guess if I were to advise my past self to share with you: Don't ever let anyone (including yourself) burn you out of what you enjoy doing. If you're working on a project, especially if it's a huge long-ass tedious project, then take breaks, even if you're excited, eager, and want to see immediate progress, or the final version get released quickly. You'll get there, you just need to take your time, take care of yourself physically and mentally. Don't search for excuses to not continue as well, don't stop because "hurr durr the software i use isn't gud its html5 not native", if you can dig your hands into shit and produce gold, then nobody will care that you touched shit.